Defending the Ridiculous

(Please note before reading, I actually do not care one way or the other in this matter.)

I overheard two friends discussing the proposal from North Carolina representative Patrick McHenry to change the $50 bill.  His proposal involves replacing Ulysses S Grant with Ronald Reagan on the $50 bill.  Now this isn’t the first time we have replaced the image on our money but apparently this one is a big deal.  As an example for changing images the one dollar coin was Eisenhower, then Susan B. Anthony, then Sacagawea, and now some presidential collection, a la the state quarters.

McHenry’s very forward reason for this is to have at least one modern republican on a bill.  The two modern presidents that are on money are Franklin Roosevelt and President John F. Kennedy, both of which were democrats.  I have to applaud McHenry for not trying to avoid the real reason behind this move, but I don’t understand why replace Grant.  I think a better approach would be getting Reagan on the $20 bill.  My thought here is that Andrew Jackson didn’t even support the idea of paper money.

Now to cover why Reagan would actually deserve to be on a bill.  The first is that he ended the Cold War.  Okay so his way of ending the Cold War was through the lie known as Star Wars but he did end it.  For those unaware, Star Wars was a supposed satellite defense system.  Reagan suggested that we would be launching it soon, and in a an effort to compete with the concept the U.S.S.R. bankrupted itself.  Another aspect that might work in Regan’s favour is Reaganomics.  Reaganomics for the most part is heavily criticized, however if you compare most numbers it did help in several ways.  These improvements included lower unemployment rates, family incomes grew by $4000, and interest rates even fell.  However like most presidential economic plans this may have just happened during a cycle or been affected by previous presidents’ plans.

Now one of the points brought up was, why former president Bill Clinton shouldn’t instead grace a bill.  The first and most obvious reason would be that he is not a republican.  It is unlikely that a republican like Representative McHenry would suggest Clinton.  Another reason is his impeachment.  I’m not saying I care about his affair but other countries may not respect the USA as much if our money bares the face of one of the only two presidents to be impeached.  Then the final reason, in my opinion, is that he committed “treason”.  Now it was never called treason, but declassifying military information to sell to China seems to fit the description.

Overall, I could care less if they change the bill.  Let’s be realistic a lot of our money looks like it came out of a Monopoly box, so a face changing can’t make it too much worse.